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Big plans for connecting over half the world

It’s a spectacular-sounding goal: thousands – perhaps even tens of thousands – of tiny satellites in low Earth orbit beaming the internet to anyone, anywhere. OneWeb is the name of one firm planning to do this. It launched its first six satellites in February. The ultimate aim is to broadcast a mobile internet signal that anyone, anywhere, can connect to with a smartphone.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX also plans to launch a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, . There may eventually be more than one satellite network competing to offer broadband internet around the world this way. The impact this could have on employment is staggering.

“OneWeb are looking to put up around 1,900 satellites. SpaceX are going close to 12,000,” says Christopher Newman, a professor of space law and policy at Northumbria University. Currently, there are about 2,000 commercial satellites in orbit around the Earth, so the increase would be massive.

“We’re talking about a genuine disruption to the space environment.”

He says the topic needs a “dose of realism” – it’s not yet clear whether these satellite constellations will be cost-effective to run or if they’ll create too much space debris, polluting the orbital environment. But if they do take off, Newman thinks it will change the world of work drastically.

How wider internet coverage will affect work

Madgavkar says that what’s happening in India is an early indicator of how other economies might change, should internet coverage reach all corners of the planet. She explains that the vast majority of Indian workers are engaged in informal or self-employed work known as “micro enterprises”. Like the lunch runners, this is work that could conceivably be arranged via apps – Uber for anything.

There is evidence that the arrival of high-speed internet access, , can enhance productivity and transform local economies.  In India, for instance, farmers and fishers using mobile phones to check prices and weather conditions .

There may be less predictable effects. that women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises in Indonesia generate 35% of the country’s ecommerce revenue. For offline women-owned businesses of the same sizes, that share drops to just 15%.

Madgavkar says greater connectivity means more opportunities for remote workers. Bank employees, for instance, can offer services to customers via phone. People can be trained remotely for service-based or advisory roles and do much of the work from afar too. With satellite internet, the numbers applying for such jobs could boom.

Online freelancing platforms like oDesk could also swell. discusses how these sites are being used by online workers in Southeast Asia. The paper gives the example of Amy, a Filipina woman with five siblings. The main breadwinner for her family, she switched from working in a call centre to working as a remote personal assistant for an American woman selling art on Etsy. Amy found herself earning double what she made in the call centre job. 

Soon, the biggest hurdle to all this won’t be technology but an older bugbear: lack of education. Literacy has improved slightly in India recently; however, a quarter of its population still cannot read or write. Many other countries face the same problem. Internet access – for those who can afford it – can’t solve everything.

Avoiding the downsides of internet-powered work

As well, there is a darker side to jobs created by the internet. Besides concerns that platforms like Uber and Deliveroo , there are also entirely new categories of job that will seem mind-numbingly menial to many. These include “click work” – such as highly repetitive image-tagging to train artificial neural networks in pattern recognition. This sort of thing helps fine tune the algorithms that big tech firms use in their products.

Mark Graham, a professor of internet geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, where workers sit at desks doing tasks like this for hours on end. The scale of it shocked him.

“Hundreds of people all focusing intently on their screens,” he describes it. “And there is fierce competition on these platforms.”

There are more click workers than click work, it turns out. As the next 100 million people get connected, and the next, competition will only get fiercer.

“It makes it harder for you as an individual worker to command a higher wage,” explains Graham. “Someone on the other side of the planet can do the same job for a much lower rate.”

Graham points out that it’s not just menial click work that can be farmed out to emerging economies. Opportunities in web development, programming and design are also coming to regions with improving internet access.

This raises the question of whether we all might find ourselves fighting to keep our jobs – once we become part of a truly global and connected workforce. To be fair, outsourcing is not possible for every role – there is a long history of companies failing to relocate operations to countries with lower wages. But if outsourcing does become easier and cheaper thanks to technology, some employees who were never threatened with it before will soon find themselves affected. A global race to the bottom, with terrible payments and working conditions, might ensue.

 “I think we all need to be careful about making sure transformation and reorganisations don’t represent a fundamental erosion in the rights that we have as workers and the quality of our jobs,” adds Graham.

We’re at least five to ten years away from seeing one of these satellite networks come online, says Alzbeta Fellenbaum, a market analyst at IHS Markit. But in the context of a person’s career, that’s not a very long time.

Today, superior internet connectivity can still elevate one country’s workforce above another. But that might not last forever.